Calgary Road Trip - Getting Settled at the Ranch

TRIED to follow the Googlemaps directions out of downtown Calgary to the ranch. What a fiasco! Do yourself a favour and buy a mapbook. The instructions got North/South right but missed the mark on East/West and on the names of a couple of critical exits off the highway. We ended up going in the wrong direction a couple of times and, before you say it, yes...we can all read maps. Finally, we stopped at a gas station adjacent to a mall and, as it turned out, we were only about 5 minutes away from the ranch. In all, what should have taken only about 20 minutes took us about an hour and frazzled the hell out of us.

When we pulled into the ranch, we immediately noticed that the camping area was packed. We parked at the admin office/general store and registered to camp. The two ladies behind the counter were just as frazzled as we were by this point because they had been registering people all morning and had lost track of whether or not they had any camping space left. After about a second and a half of thought, they came to the conclusion that they could "squeeze" us in. And squeeze us in they did. We followed some old geezer (I'll call him Joe) on a golf cart around on a 15 minute exploration of the camping sites to see what he could find. Eventually, Joe directed us to set up on the edge of a sand volleyball court. We parked the vehicles and set up the tents. The barrier you see behind us and the couple of other tents are the only thing that separated us from a very, VERY busy highway.

As a side note, I wanted to add here that we hadn't been at our site more than about 10 minutes when I heard someone calling, "Alan". It turns out that several Vancouverites come to this rodeo every year. Here's a pic of Luis and Brie (Klaus' favourite kind of cheese). But, they were not the only people we either recognized or met from Vancouver.

Back to my story...

It hadn't rained for awhile before the rodeo and as we found out when we tried to set up the umbrellas, the ground was so hard it was impossible to push the poles in. I, in my infinite wisdom, had brought a hammer for just such an event. However, I failed to bring something to place on the end of the poles so I didn't damage them while pounding them into the ground. "What did you do?", you ask? I folded a towel a couple of times and used that. Unfortunately, I had to use so much force that the pole started punching holes in the towel! It looked like Swiss cheese when I was done and the damn pole still wasn't in the ground!

Enter the lesbian...

Sue was at a site behind us and noticed we'd been doing the same activity for a very long time. Finally, she couldn't take it anymore and came over with a 2x4 to help the poor gay boys out. It definitely did the trick. Both poles were in the ground in a matter of minutes. However, I actually split the 2x4 lengthwise with all the pounding! Finally, after much bru ha ha, we were set up.

More to come...(I can't believe this is entry #6 on this trip and I've only gotten to the ranch part now).